X-Message-Number: 18234
Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2001 20:38:39 -0800
From: Olaf Henny <>
Subject: A late reply to Ron Have
References: <>

Sorry for the delay in this reply to Ron's Post of December 11,
but I had some other priorities.

In Message #18140 Ron Have wrote in part:

>Dear Olaf, I am very sorry that your aunt had to lose her son on the eastern
>front but I take the strongest exception to your interpretation of her story.
> The fact is that hundreds of thousands of German soldiers were dying on the
>eastern front at the time and as many mothers worried for the worst.  How
>many would have had similar quasi-hallucinatory experiences on any given day?
> How many of these would later find that their sons died on that very same
>day? I would suggest hundreds if not thousands.  There is absolutely no
>evidence for telepathic communication in your anecdote.

Neither is there an evidence *against* it in your reply.  This
"quasi-hallucinatory" experience, as you to tactfully put it
pertained to *the one* of the two sons who were at this time on
the front (the other one was killed later and a third one had
previously been killed in action; the fourth son was thankfully
young enough to be only drafted during the last few month of the
war and survived). So, you see she could just as easily have
"hallucinated" about any of the other sons on the day of Hans'
death.  But she did not.  Her message was from Hans as he was
dying.

Your Occam s razor aside I have made scores of observations,
which strongly indicate, that animals can communicate mind to
mind.  I have observed that in dogs, horses and cats.
Specifically in dogs I have experienced clear reactions to my
thoughts, and no, I am not talking about dogs I owned or which knew
me well, but about dogs I had never seen before.  When I was in
my teens I had a great love for dogs, especially well trained
ones, - maybe because they were something even I could be  master 
of. :)

On several occasions, when I saw an especially well trained dog
walking  at heel  with his owner, the dog broke off and came
running to me, much to the consternation of the owner.  I never
called these dogs, I only admired them in my mind.  On two other
occasions dogs clearly set out to attack me broke off in mid
stride and became suddenly quite docile.  When working in Iran
some of us had horses and we were in the habit of letting them
set there own pace, while we carried on a conversation.  It
happened time and again, that they broke from easy walk into
straight gallop.  We could never tell, which one the instigator
was.  Had there been a reaction time from one horse to the other
of only a tenth of a second, it would have shown.  It was clearly
a case of the horse-equivalent of "ready - set - go", only I never
heard any words to that effect.  Speaking of horses: Anybody, who
has ever been around horses will tell you that they have an
uncanny sense for the attitude of the rider.  If you don t have the
confidence, the horse won't go.  I once went on a ride with a
fellow, who was a novice on horseback, when we came to a weir: a
walkway made of wooden planks an below noisy, rushing water.  I
rode across, but the horse of the other fellow refused.  He
dismounted and try to lead it across. The horse neighed reared
snorted and refused.  So I tied mine down on the other side,
walked across, hopped on his horse and rode it across without
any hesitation on the horses part.  I did not whisper in its ear:
"Hey, I am confident" or  "I know, what I am doing" or any other
magic words.  The horse simply knew, that it was okay.  HOW? -
your guess is as good as mine, but mine is, that there was some
kind of a thought projection between our minds going on.

Of course there are all those theories bandied about, that an
animal can "smell fear" and reacts accordingly or such.  But in
many cases an animals reaction is much more immediate and at
greater distance, than can be conveyed by smell.

I believe, that our ancestors may well have had the ability of
mind to mind communication, before it was atrophied by the use of
spoken language, which was more concise and diverse.  In some of
us this ability is latent and may be revived in certain
circumstances.


>As yet there is no more evidence for
>telepathic communication than there is for the coutless "miracles" that fill
>the Bible and other religious texts.

Wrong!  There may not be any proof (as yet), but there is lots of
evidence.

>Even when anecdotes are carefully
>documented, they cannot stand as evidence unless and until they can be
>repeated and redocumented under the watchful gaze of multiple objective
>observers, preferably observers who have no personal stake in the outcome.
>As the years go by and our numbers grow, we will come under increasing attack
>from many quarters.  There will be many in the scientific community who will
>join this negative chorus, but when they do, we should be in a position to
>come right back at them: cryonics is not religion, and its not supestition or
>magic.  It is simple logic founded in what is already firmly established in
>science and science-derived technolog and medicine.  We must stick to this
>base to retain our credibility with the few who might be persuaded.

I don t quite see the connection, other than that Chinese saying:
 A closed mind is like a closed book, - just a piece of wood  And
that is *their* problem, not ours.


 To dismiss mind to mind communication out of hand, just because
we don t know its scientific base is hubris akin to Cryobiologist
Arthur Rowe's: "Believing cryonics could reanimate somebody who
has been  frozen is like believing you can turn hamburger back into a
cow." or to the fellow who said about 100 years ago: "All that
can be invented has been invented" - especially if it comes from
a culture, the scientists of which haven't even figured out yet
what really happens to our bodies chemically or physically, when
we sleep, a phenomenon, which is even more urgent than - and as
basic to our survival as eating and drinking.  If we could
understand this and could somehow eliminate or at least
concentrate this process in a shorter, the economic benefit would
be immeasurable.  If we cannot even even understand this daily
occurrence, which affects not only more than six billion people,
but trillions of other living beings, and have very little idea
about many functions of the brain, how can we with straight face
and the pretence of confidence claim that mind to mind
communication is nonsense.

Then there is that experiment by NASA, which may carry a little
more weight: A woman with external sensors affixed to her scull
managed to operate a computer directing a mock-up of machinery,
which performed all the mechanical actions necessary to land a
large jetliner.  That landing was virtually performed on the
computer screen.  The key is, that the sensors were external.
The thought commands had to penetrate the scull and enter the
sensors. - HOW?

This experiment has of course never been repeated by peers, -
there aren't too many of those with similar resources.  So you
may well write that also off as unacceptable evidence.

To return to Arthur Rowe's hamburger quote, I am asking the
biomedical experts in this group: With the recent successful
cloning experiments, using somatic cells, is there anything,
which would make it impossible, to grind up a piece of meat
from a freshly killed cow, separate a cell, insert it into a genetically
neutralized cows egg and clone it?  That would be a certain
sense turning hamburger back into a cow. :) - I know, this
would have little to do with what we want to achieve in cryonics,
but it would knock the hell out of good Arthur's argument.  :)

Best,
Olaf

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